


Thank You

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Childhood, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-03-23 11:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3766576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are eight years old and your world is trying to fall apart around you but damned if you aren't going to try and hold it together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thank You

**Author's Note:**

> Directly inspired by [this fic by Rae](http://punishandenslavesuckers.tumblr.com/post/82500711984/hey-you-should-do-a-chex-fic-dont-care-if-its), about Allison's death. I borrowed the number as a nod to it. Read it. It's really great.

You were eight when your mother died. Old enough to know her. Old enough to know the heart in your chest and how it beat, and old enough to feel it break when they told you she was gone. They did it the old-fashioned way, maybe because of how she died, maybe because of who your father was. You don’t know. But you remember the woman at the door in her sharp blue UNSC uniform. You remember her taking off her hat. You remember running to your room and hearing your father yelling.

You remember how in the books you read about the old Earth wars, people made casseroles. You used to wonder why.

At the memorial service, you didn’t cry. You knew you were supposed to. You had already spent too many years breaking yourself of crying in front of people, so that no boy and no bully and no teacher and no friend would ever see tears on your face. You cried in your room, you screamed and you threw things and you punched the walls but you couldn’t cry in the front row of the community center with the sea of eyes behind you.

 

At the reception a man came up to you. He was in uniform, but you weren’t scared. There was nothing more to be afraid of. You remembered him from the service, how he wept openly into his big hands.

“I served with your mother,” he said. His eyes were still wet and he seemed unashamed. “She was a hero.” You hadn’t known that. Maybe the woman at the door told your father that. He didn’t tell you. He hadn’t been talking. “She saved my life. She saved four dozen of us, maybe more. Thank you.” You didn’t understand the  _thank you_. “She talked about you. She loved you so much. She wanted you to grow up safe. I’m so sorry, so very sorry for your loss.”

(You remember how your father used to say your mother could make a grown man cry. You didn’t think this was what he meant. Looking back now, you’re not so sure.)

You didn’t know what to say so you nodded and repeated back to him, “Thank you.”

 

There was a lot of food at the reception and a lot of people. You stood beside one of the tables silently eating cheese cubes off toothpicks and lining them up in a little pile under the rim of the plate. You weren’t sure where your father was, or who most of these people were, but you were hungry. It was weird to be hungry. You hadn’t been eating much besides the sleeve of crackers you took up to your room. Your father didn’t make dinner. Didn’t buy milk or eggs or lunch meat. You stayed in your room and didn’t go to school for three days. He didn’t say anything about that.

So you were really hungry and you ate a lot of those cheese cubes and now you understood the whole casserole thing.

 

When the reception was over, some people stayed to pack up the leftover food. Most of them were in uniforms too. They packed up a lot of plastic containers and put them in grocery bags and they looked at your father and they whispered to each other some and then they called you over and gave the bags to you.

You took them. You felt very serious and heavy and grown up. You said, “Thank you.”


End file.
